RSS technology, also known as “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary,” is a fairly new tool commonly used in news gathering. In operation, RSS provides an efficient way to distribute or share news-related items between web sites. For example, by employing RSS, individuals can receive news content from a variety of RSS-compliant news services.
RSS is based on an XML grammar that defines data items with HTML-like meta tags. RSS text files are generally formatted with static information about a website as well as dynamic information regarding the sought-after content. The RSS text file encapsulates both sets of information as RSS XML data items and sandwiches the data items between matching beginning and end tags. The RSS formatted text file can then be registered with an RSS Aggregator. RSS Aggregators are RSS-aware programs that are capable of checking and collecting the feeds containing the sought-after RSS XML items from multiple sources. The sought-after content may then be accessed by any Internet-accessible location. As such, RSS provides a convenient, efficient, and virtually ubiquitous platform for the distribution and collection of news-related content.
In contrast, system administrators, responsible for the overall health of their network infrastructure, do not have such a platform at their disposal. Currently, system administrators have to mine status information from multiple, often disparate, sources to obtain an adequate representation of the state of the network infrastructure.